First off--I'm not entirely sure I understand the point of a pen name if, on the cover of one's first novel, one is going to say, 'DBC Pierre is the pen name of [actual name].'

Second, I was annoyed from page one by "f*cken" and "ole," which surely should be "f*uckin'" and "ol'."

And finally, I can't work out why every person of Mexican extraction in the book can pronounce the second 'n' in Vernon, but can't seem to pronounce the first.

Ok...been waiting to get that off my chest for a month.

As a summary, I will say that I eventually got past these initial problems and would classify the work as a page-turner, if I never really did find myself liking it much. Apparently it's supposed to be clever for being a caricature of small-town American life and American media. Perhaps, to an outside audience, it is effective as such. To me, it was not much more than a Gerry-Springer-fication of small-town American life and American media--taking cheap shots at and sensationalising some of the more obvious targets in its sights, and not really ever hitting upon anything original or particularly illuminating.

I may be going a bit far too soon here, but I found almost all of the characters to be shallow (meaning their characters and Pierre's characterisation of them), mostly being over-the-top representations of about four Typical American Folks. I'm not entirely certain, for example, that all of Vernon's mother's friends were necessary, as they all were just about the same person. One of them was slightly more chubby, and Pierre went to great lengths to point this out fairly regularly.

So, all in all, again, I found it interesting enough that I wanted to turn the pages to see what happened. There also were some clever turns of phrase, although they lost some of their effectiveness, hidden amongst hundreds of attempts to impress the reader with sometimes not clever turns of phrase. I would sum up my impressions by repeating something I said to Amner upon finishing it: "So people win awards for this sort of thing, huh?"

Sorry...over to everyone else.

__________________
"I learned never to drink anything out of a jar labeled 'w-i-s-k-i.'"

I'm only about 70 pages into the book but I share many Jerkass's objections. Cheap shots is exactly what I thought at many passages. As to the language I quite like 'fucken' and 'ole' because even if I don't pronounce it mentally precisely in the way intended by the author, IMO it nicely denotes the local accent (he uses 'fuckin' when he tries to render the New York accent -'my pessimist has a New york accent, don't ask me why'). The 'gh-rrr' thing really gets on my nerves though.

Just finished it this moment and loved it from start to finish. I'll put more down later but my only main hang-up was the 'Gr-rr' thing and the name 'Gurie'. I'm not too fussed at to whether it was playing with archetypes or supra-fictionalising an outsider's impression of everything Texan etc. There were only a few cracks where I felt it wasn't playing for real and Pierre poked through the thin patches. It felt like I was reading Catcher... and it worked out its own positive ending, thankfully (I was quite pleased to have my expectations upturned in the last chapter, even though the authorial side of how Vernon actually was narrating his story should have indicated this - I was presuming it was something along the lines of The Lovely Bones).

If everyone else has finished the book now, I'll say more in a day (though my compy is away ill and I'm stuck for chances to use Mr. Colyngbourne's).